J-List Snack Subscription Box : December 2015

Hey there geekonistas!

Okay, so first off I need to apologize for the quality of the photographs in this post. It's a gray, rainy day here in the desert so I thought I would finally actually get my light box up and running. Ahahahah. It worked, for all of ten seconds until one of the lights fell over and stopped working. Like, I had no idea they were that fragile? It seriously just took a little bump and the whole thing frazzled. I'm going to either return or replace it, but in the meantime, in order to get a post up today at all I had to use only one light. So, yes. My apologies. At least today the subscription box I am bringing you is the December J-List Snack Subscription box, so it doesn't matter too much if it's a little shadowy and not quite true to color, right? Right??

In case you aren't familiar, J-List is a website that sells items directly from Japan. They have a wide range of anime items, along with kitchen and household things, snacks, and more. The "more" includes a lot of "ecchi" or adult items, so if that kind of thing offends you you can always check out the J-Box site, which is a G rated version of J-List. This subscription is actually not currently available from the website. J-List recently changed over to a completely new site and they are still working to transfer things like subscriptions over.  Unfortunately, this means I don't have any information about pricing for you at this time. (I prepaid a year in advance, so it doesn't get charged every month.) I will update this post as soon as the subscriptions go live again!

We've got some seriously delicious snacks this month, starting with a take on one of my favorite Japanese snacks, melonpan. Despite the name, which translates to "melon bread" it is not melon flavored. Melonpan itself is a soft, sweet roll that has cookie dough pressed into a crisscross pattern and baked on top. This gives it the appearance of melon skin.  This bag contains two small, just cookie versions of the melonpan, one traditional and one filled with melon cream. The traditional one was okay, tasted like a stale shortbread, but the melon one was just kind of too weird to wrap my tastebuds around.

The next snack in the box is called "Heavy Rope Cheese Rice Cracker". I assume the name comes from the fact that each peice looks a little bit like a twist of rope. I found these quite delicious, very light and crispy, but without too much of a pronounced cheese flavor.

I can't tell if this child is happy or in pain. Maybe both?

This snack has a really cool look to it. This is "Sasha Strawberry Chocolate" and each piece looks like its made up of individual thin lines of chocolate. Both the strawberry and the chocolate flavors came through nicely, and the texture was very light.  The chocolate had a nice smooth mouthfeel as it melted as well.

The next snack has a strawberry chocolate flavor to it as well. These are "Oreo Premium Strawberry Chocolates". I didn't like the strawberry flavor on these quite as well as the last one, but it was still tasty. These are little nuggets of crushed Oreo cookie with a strawberry cream, coated in dark chocolate.

I was a bit nervous to test this next snack. It's simply identified on the card as "Soft Tempura Snack", which could have referred to anything you can dip in tempura batter and deep fry, including vegetables, squid, or other fish, and I really don't like squid much.  Turned out I was nervous for good reason - these smell fishy and taste the same. They were also very chewy.

After cleansing my palate with some rubbing alcohol, I was ready to try the next snack - "Melon Soda and Cola Gummy". These were quite interesting. The gummy was soft and chewy, with a white "cream float" base. The flavors weren't too powerful but you could definitely tell what they were supposed to be.
 

Also from the sweet side is this package of "White Lady Fingers Bake Chocolate". This was a cute little tray of ten nuggets with a somewhat crispy thin shell around a somewhat creamy chocolate center. I don't know about Lady Finger flavor, they just tasted like white chocolate to me, with kind of a gritty texture that was not unpleasant.

Next up is a product that was not listed on the information card. These are matcha (green tea) caramels with a soft texture and a very strong, almost licorice-like green tea flavor. As you chew, the mellower caramel flavor comes to the forefront, making a nice contrast with the matcha flavor.

And the final product this month is another DIY candy kit! I always have a lot of fun making these, even if the end result isn't always delicious.  This kit is a "Hand Making Ramune Set". Ramune is a particularly Japanese soda flavor, and this kit appears to allow you to make tablet style candies in a variety of soda flavors.

This is what the kit comes with. The instructions are, of course, all in Japanese and I couldn't find a translation anywhere but they seemed pretty simple to follow so I decided to give it a shot.

First I poured each powder into the large tray and added one spoonful of water.

I then hand mixed it using a pinching motion to evenly distribute the moisture and give it a crumbly texture. This is the same kind of motion you use if you have ever made biscuits by hand. Of course, because it's me I spilled powder everywhere.

Then I transferred each completed powder to a holding tray.

 The instructions show that you can mix up some of the powders to get new colors as well, so I decided to try to get some purple by mixing red and blue. It worked pretty well, actually!

Next I scooped the powders into the mold. This was a bit difficult considering how small the molds are, but I got there in the end. Luckily there was plenty of powder to make more than one batch!

I then pressed the powder down into the mold using the included backing. And the moment of truth.. I turned the mold over to get the completed candies out. Surprisingly, not bad! They were still pretty soft so moving them around much wasn't an option, but they were actually kind of tasty, too. Very strong fruity flavors and a little bit of fizz. There's enough powder to make 4-5 batches of these but I don't know if I want to do that much work for my candy.

Well, that's it for the December 2015 J-List Snack Subscription Box. What did you think? I had a lot of fun with it, except that Tempura snack... shudder.

Thanks for hanging out, even through my technical difficulties!